Marek Patches A "Mega Radeon" Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Marek Patches A "Mega Radeon" Driver

In an effort to aid distribution vendors maximizing their disk space and simplify things, AMD developer Marek Ol??k has posted a patch for possible take-up for a "Mega Radeon" driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY5MTA

[mmstick]

Rather than calling the mega radeon driver r300_dri.so, I would think just naming it radeon_dri.so would be best. After all, they are all under the radeon branding.

[dungeon]

Rather than calling the mega radeon driver r300_dri.so, I would think just naming it radeon_dri.so would be best. After all, they are all under the radeon branding.

radeon_dri.so name is in use by classic driver for original radeon .

[mark_]

I'm asking myself why the distributions install every driver in the first place. I don't need Nvidia and intel (or matrox or S3) drivers if I am using an ATI card but nonetheless they are installed. And if I try to remove them, the packaging software probably wants to remove all desktop and X11 packets because they "depend" on drivers I never use.
But instead of improving their shitty packagers and introducing a hardware detection at installation time - sure, let the upstreamers change everything to save some space (the Windows drivers also include everything for all cards and even a config interface with dependant libraries, who cares about 200MB drivers there?).
If they are so anal about package size, they probably want to shrink their kernel images from 30MB to 2MB first, then we'll talk again.

[enfocomp]

I'm asking myself why the distributions install every driver in the first place. I don't need Nvidia and intel (or matrox or S3) drivers if I am using an ATI card but nonetheless they are installed. And if I try to remove them, the packaging software probably wants to remove all desktop and X11 packets because they "depend" on drivers I never use.
But instead of improving their shitty packagers and introducing a hardware detection at installation time - sure, let the upstreamers change everything to save some space (the Windows drivers also include everything for all cards and even a config interface with dependant libraries, who cares about 200MB drivers there?).
If they are so anal about package size, they probably want to shrink their kernel images from 30MB to 2MB first, then we'll talk again.

So you can switch components without having to rebuild your operating system.

[rohcQaH]

Yeah. For someone who's capable of setting VIDEO_CARDS="r600", this change means that my driver is now 7 MB instead of 6 MB because it supports cards I don't have. I don't care about 1 MB on my hard drive, but 1 MB of RAM seems like a needless waste.

Doesn't look like there'll be an option to compile them separately though.

[AJenbo]

I'm asking myself why the distributions install every driver in the first place.

Live images where mentioned specifically in the article, for them install time is to late.

[enfocomp]

Excellent idea, keep up the good work!

I have finally switched over to AMD open source drivers & boycotted Catalyst. After not trying them for about a year, I'm VERY impressed with the performance (currently using the 3.14 kernel). They even work on my Radeon HD 4200 IGP using 1080p video, something they would struggle with last time I used them.

[newwen]

Thank you Marek, you're a hero.

[curaga]

@mark_

You likely know this already, but most users do not know what they need. If the default install does not show a screen, or only ships vesa, they will complain, instead of only installing the driver for their card.